In Medias Res (5 page)

“Ready for that ride yet?” she asked. “My pedi-cab’s right over there.”

She pointed behind her to a three-wheeled vehicle that was parked near the entrance to the square. So that explained both her tan and her great legs.

“How much is the fare?”

“That’s negotiable. Why don’t we figure it out when we get there?” I didn’t bite. “Okay,” she said, holding up her hands. “It’s twenty-five dollars an hour, the base rate’s fifteen. Unless, of course, you tell me you’re staying on one of the other islands. Then we really would have to do some negotiating.”

I eased her mind. “No, I’m staying close to where you saw me this afternoon.”

“Then shall we?”

I followed her to the pedi-cab and climbed in the backseat. She stood on the pedals to create enough force to get the wheels moving. She sat down once we were under way.

I guess I should have passed on dessert. On second thought, the key lime pie I’d had was worth the extra pound or two.

“Are you staying at Pearl’s?” Marcy asked, half-turning in her seat.

“Not quite.”

“Oh, that’s right. You’re married. Too many lesbians hang out there.” She took one hand off the handlebars and shook her left arm. The rubber rainbow bracelet on her wrist slid toward her elbow but quickly resumed its former position when she reached for the bottle of water clamped to the bar between her legs. She offered me a sip, but I shook my head.

“You enjoy teasing me, don’t you?”

She grinned, flashing those peach pit dimples again. “I would enjoy doing a lot of things to you if you’d let me.” She returned the water to its holder.

I turned my attention to a bearded man wearing black motorcycle boots, tight jeans, black leather chaps, and white angel wings. “I think that’s my cue.”

“To do what?” Marcy asked.

I turned back to her so she wouldn’t think I was avoiding the issue at hand. “To end this conversation.”

“Why? Am I getting too close? Am I making you uncomfortable?”

“You’re coming on a bit strong.” I held on to the sides of the carriage as she braked for a red light.

“That’s not an answer,” she shot back. “Neither is ‘I’m married.’”

She was challenging me. I wasn’t sure if I liked it. “What do you consider an answer?”

Her eyes bored into me. “That depends on the question, now, doesn’t it?”

“What’s your question?” I asked, afraid of what her answer would be.

“I have several, but I’ll start with an easy one.” The light turned green again. “What’s your name?” she asked once we were under way again.

I told her.

“And where’s your husband tonight, Sydney?”

I told her that, too.

So much for the easy ones. I hoped the degree of difficulty on the hard ones would be relatively low. I didn’t want to lie to her or be forced to make something up. Which, I suppose, were one and the same.

“And what does he do in Chicago?”

“He’s a doctor,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t ask me what kind. I didn’t know. He could have been anything. I felt increasingly uncomfortable. The ride wasn’t that far, but it seemed like it would never end. Sharing the narrow road with cars, scooters, and bicycles was nerve-wracking, too. I kept expecting one of them to turn us into road kill. I felt exposed—in more ways than one.

“What about you?” Marcy pressed.

“I’m a doctor’s wife.”

“Besides that.”

“I’m still working on that one.”

She looked at me over her shoulder as she turned left on United Street. “Now
that
is an answer.”

The traffic on United wasn’t as heavy as that on Duval. With fewer obstacles to dodge, Marcy covered the ten blocks in about ten seconds. She left the pedi-cab at the curb while she walked me to my door.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” she asked.

“Grocery shopping. My cupboards are bare.”

“What about after that?”

I unlocked the deadbolt and stepped inside to shut off the alarm. “I haven’t planned that far ahead yet.” Standing in the half-open doorway, I held one hand on the knob. I was hoping she’d get the hint without making me appear rude by asking her to leave.

“Would you like to have dinner?” she asked. “Maybe go dancing? Or better yet, we could get up early, catch a cat, and go snorkeling. The water’s crystal clear and the coral’s beautiful.”

Confused by her terminology, I assumed cat meant catamaran, not Morris or Garfield or one of their six-toed stray cousins I’d seen running around. “I shouldn’t.”

“Why?” She shoved her hands in the back pockets of her cutoffs. “Do you have something against snorkeling?”

“No, but I don’t want to lead you on.” She seemed so excited about the prospect of being with me that I had to put a stop to it.

“I think I’m the one who’s doing the leading here, don’t you?” She didn’t wait for me to answer the question. “I know you’re married, Sydney. Even though I’m attracted to you, I can respect that. The fact that you’re straight and married and I’m gay and unattached doesn’t stop us from being friends, does it?”

Finally, another easy question. “No, it doesn’t. It might even make it easier.”

She grinned as if I’d said something amusing, profound, or incredibly naïve. “Then I’ll see you in the morning?”

Her enthusiasm broke down my defenses. “What time?”

Her face brightened. “I’ll pick you up here at seven thirty.”

I grimaced. “That early?”

“If you want to beat the crowd, it’s a necessary evil, I’m afraid. We have to drive to the Seaport to charter a catamaran—if they’re not all taken—then follow that up with a forty-minute boat ride to the reef. But once we get there, we can take as long as we want.”

“Then seven thirty it is.” I tightened my grip on the doorknob. “I’d better get to bed and you’d better get back to work.”

“I have a confession to make.” She leaned toward me and motioned for me to follow suit. When I did, she said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Today’s my day off.”

“So the cab ride was—”

“An opportunity to spend some time with you.” She smiled sheepishly. “Are we still on for tomorrow?”

“Only if you promise to be honest with me from now on. If we’re to be friends, I’d like to believe that I can trust you.”

“You can.”

“Prove it to me.”

“How?”

“Answer a question for me.”

“Anything. What do you want to know?”

“What do you want from me?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Everything you have to give.”

When Marcy left, I didn’t go to bed like I’d said I would. I went to work. She might have had the night off, but I didn’t.

A thick medical encyclopedia lay on the banquette in the kitchen. I used it to perform a quick bit of self-diagnosis.

There were seven types of amnesia to choose from.

Anteretrograde amnesia was marked by the inability to remember ongoing events after the incidence of trauma or the onset of the disease that caused the condition.

Because I remembered everything that had happened since I found myself running through O’Hare, I ruled that out.

Korsakoff’s syndrome was memory loss caused by chronic alcoholism.

I wasn’t craving a bottle of vodka or shaking uncontrollably from the DT’s so I ruled that one out, too.

Lacunar amnesia was the inability to remember a specific event.

Close, but no cigar—unless my entire life counted as a specific event.

Posthypnotic amnesia seemed like a bit of a stretch. Unless someone had drugged me, I didn’t see myself being able to relax enough to fall for the dangling watch on a chain and the old “You are getting very sleepy.” I was too much of a type-A personality for that.

That left three possibilities.

Transient global amnesia, spontaneous memory loss that could last from minutes to several hours, seemed like the likeliest suspect—until I read the part about it being usually seen in middle-aged to elderly people. I didn’t fit in either of those categories. Not yet, anyway.

Retrograde amnesia was the inability to remember events that occurred prior to the onset of amnesia.

“Sufferers do not lose all their memories,” I read. “Usually, the memory loss is worst for events just before the injury. Events from long ago are more likely to be safe.”

That could explain why I remembered being eight but not eighteen.

Based on what I read, if I had amnesia of the retrograde variety, I wouldn’t ever remember what had caused my memory loss or the events leading up to it. Caused by brain injury or disease, retrograde amnesia didn’t seem likely, though. My head was still attached to my shoulders and I felt fine physically. A little full from dinner, but otherwise fine.

That left emotional/hysterical amnesia, memory loss caused by psychological trauma. I latched on to that one. It seemed to fit and, more importantly, it was described as being “usually temporary.” I liked that part best of all.

I dressed for bed but went into the living room. The home movies in the bookcase were sorted by date. I didn’t pull out the earliest one. Those memories were coming back on their own. Instead, I skipped to the ones that covered the periods that were still missing from my mind: high school and beyond.

I took a tape titled “Senior Prom, April 1996” off the shelf and slid it into the VCR side of the DVD/VCR combo while I tuned the TV to channel three. I grabbed the VCR remote off the coffee table and sat on the couch. A sticky linoleum floor and a tub of hot buttered popcorn would have made for the perfect movie-going experience. I had neither. What I had was a date with my newfound friend: the unknown.

Shaky images filled the TV screen.

Patrick had manned the camera. As he sneaked up the stairs of our parents’ house, he provided whispered narration like a nature photographer trying not to spook his subject.

At the top of the stairs, he turned the camera on himself. The low angle made him look ten feet tall. Since he was only five feet nine, he would have liked that. He had made the video when he was a nineteen-year-old sophomore at the University of Illinois. I’d followed him there a year later. He had majored in sports medicine; I had chosen pre-law. Currently, he was a member of the Chicago Bears’ medical staff. I was a mystery wrapped inside an enigma—or however the saying goes.

How did I know all that? The images on the screen brought it back to me.

My life was finally coming into focus. Eager for more of the same, I moved closer to the TV set like a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons over a bowl of sugar-laden cereal.

“We’re here to observe the mating—sorry, Mom and Dad—I mean
dating
habits of one Sydney Paulsen,” Patrick said into the camera, sounding like the late Steve Irwin doing his typically manic voiceover on an old episode of
Crocodile Hunter
. “Today we will be witnessing a ritual known as prom night. Observe.”

Turning the camera around again, Patrick continued down the hall. He stopped in front of a door that looked vaguely familiar. The Keep Out sign on the outside of the door had been amended to include the coda, “Patrick, this means YOU!!”

I remembered making the sign while Patrick and I were both in high school. When he went away to college, I hadn’t bothered to take it down. It seemed he was around more when he didn’t live at home than when he did.

Music and laughter seeped out of the closed door. Patrick opened the door, catching me and Jennifer
in flagrante delicto
—dancing deliriously in our pastel prom dresses to the dated strains of Los Del Rio. The duo’s infectious song wouldn’t sweep the U.S. until that summer, but I had gotten hooked on it during a family vacation to Mexico the year before.

I cringed at the sight of myself in big hair and yards of taffeta. I looked like a reject from a bad eighties music video. It was the nineties. Why hadn’t I gotten the Rachel? If I had, the images of the old me dancing the Macarena wouldn’t have been nearly as damaging to my psyche—or was that my ego?

Jennifer and I were halfway through our performance before we realized Patrick was in the room.

Hearing his devious laughter, Jen wheeled and fired her hairbrush at his head. He ducked, but not fast enough. The brush caught him squarely between the eyes and he went down, yelping in pain. The camera clattered to the floor but kept recording, capturing the sight of Patrick rolling around on the floor as if the bruise on his forehead was life threatening.

“What’s going on up there?” my father called from downstairs.

“Nothing, Dad!” I shouted back.

“Stop whining, Pat,” Jennifer chided, dragging him into the room by his feet. The back of his head banged on the threshold and he howled anew. I stepped over him and closed the door. Jennifer bent and picked up the camera. Her face filled the frame. “Show’s over.”

The screen went black. When the video picked up again, the venue had changed from my bedroom to the living room. The camera panned from my mother performing a quick patch job on my hem to my father watching a Bulls game on TV to Patrick sitting forlornly on the couch with one ice pack on the front of his head and another on the back.